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Novelty, Pattern, and Force in Richard Powers's Orfeo

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orbit. Article How to Cite: Hume, K 2017 Novelty, Pattern, and Force in Richard Powers’s Orfeo. Orbit: A Journal of American Literature, 5(1): 1, pp. 1–19, DOI: https://doi.org/10.16995/orbit.202 Published: 18 January 2017 Peer Review: This article has been internally reviewed by an editor of Orbit: A Journal of American Literature, which is a journal of the Open Library of Humanities. Copyright: © 2017 The Author(s). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. Open Access: Orbit: A Journal of American Literature is a peer-reviewed open access journal. Digital Preservation: The Open Library of Humanities and all its journals are digitally preserved in the CLOCKSS scholarly archive service. The Open Library of Humanities is an open access non-profit publisher of scholarly articles and monographs. Hume Kathryn, ‘Novelty, Pattern, and Force in Richard Powers’s Orfeo’ (2017) 5(1): 1 Orbit: A Journal of American Literature, . orbit DOI: https://doi.org/10.16995/orbit.202 ARTICLE Novelty, Pattern, and Force in Richard Powers’s Orfeo Kathryn Hume Penn State University, US [email protected] Richard Powers’s Orfeo pits novelty against familiar pattern, and explores the destructive effects of forcing something new to fit known patterns in art, science, and politics. The protagonist’s dedication to writing truly new music wrecks his marriage and damages his personal life. His tinkering with novelty in bacterial genes will apparently get him killed by the police. Powers has argued in The Gold Bug Variations that the point of science is wonder, not control. Powers embodies this tension between novelty and known pattern by imposing the Orpheus myth on a composer for whom traditional patterns are anathema. Further, by embedding a radical political protest within a well-known myth, Powers demonstrates in his own writing the presentation of the new within recognizable older patterns, the tactic that protagonist Peter Els could have tried with his music if he had hoped to develop an audience. On the political level, Powers equates oppressive police power with forcing unusual people to fit a narrow range of behavior and belief patterns. 2 Hume: Novelty, Pattern, and Force in Richard Powers’s Orfeo Eleven-year-old Peter Els hears the last movement of Mozart’s Jupiter symphony for the first time: The shuffled half scale gathers mass; it sucks up other melodies into its grav- ity. Tunes and countertunes split off and replicate, chasing each other in a cosmic game of tag. At two minutes, a trapdoor opens underneath the boy. The first floor of the house dissolves above a gaping hole. Boy, stereo, speaker boxes, the love seat he sits on: all hang in place, floating on the gusher of sonority pouring into the room. Five viral strands propagate, infecting the air with runaway joy. At three and a half minutes, a hand scoops Peter up and lifts him high above the blocked vantage of his days. He rises in the shifting column of light and looks back down on the room where he listens. Wordless peace fills him at the sight of his own crumpled, listening body. And pity for anyone who mistakes this blinkered life for the real deal.1 Early in this novel, Richard Powers introduces us to the ecstasy available to some peo- ple who open themselves to art. The passage actually continues to cover several more minutes of Peter’s mystic experience, but at the end, we learn something else about such ecstasy: you cannot regain it by replaying the music. For Peter, this effect comes only from the originality and newness of the experience. Orfeo explores the joy of discovery that can be found in both art and nature. We see gradations of pleasure felt both at understanding and creating. However, such pleasures are circumscribed and opposed by patterns of human meaning-construction and human behavior. Cog- nitively, we “understand” something by fitting it into a known pattern, and we fre- quently respond to situations by trying to exert control or force. This opposition of force and ecstasy lies at the heart of this novel. In the past, most of Powers’s novels argue that we should study art or nature so deeply that we can revel in wonder at discovering things that are new to us.2 1 Richard Powers, Orfeo, 17–18. 2 J. D. Thomas argues that Powers celebrates science by superimposing religious transcendence upon science. Hume: Novelty, Pattern, and Force in Richard Powers’s Orfeo 3 This can be in scientific research (The Gold Bug Variations), in virtual reality artwork (Plowing the Dark), in music (The Time of our Singing), or in the sheer wonder of life (Generosity). He treats that profound joy as the emotion about which we should reorganize our lives and culture, rather than pursuing the transient and meaningless pleasures of consumerism. The alternative to ecstasy that Powers usually offers is service: we among the for- tunate few should devote ourselves to bettering conditions for the majority who lead damaged and tragically limited lives.3 His social vision is extremely bleak and angry. As Operation Wandering Soul puts it, “the species is clinically psychotic. Pathetic, deranged, intrinsically, irreversibly mercury-poisoned by nature, by birth. Mental thalidomide cases, every last mother’s son, as far back as accounts take things” (165). The suffering may come from natural problems (disease), but more often Powers explores racism, war, economic oppression, pollution, and eagerness to exploit sci- entific study for profit. Even art, as created in Virtual Reality in Plowing the Dark will be exploited by the Military. In Orfeo, concern with oppressed people does flare up over the slaughter of the Branch Davidians at Waco in 1993 (and their historical forerunners at the 1534 Siege of Münster), but they are not prominent throughout. Overall in this one novel, Powers shifts his moral focus away from the dreadful suf- ferings endured by most of the world’s population. As the title Orfeo suggests, music ostensibly takes center stage. Powers pays particular attention to novelty and to our drive to impose known pattern on anything new. Novelty represents the source of that wonder and joy.4 Pattern is what we impose on all novelty to explain it to ourselves. Give us a new animal or plant and we assign it a genus and species. In doing so, we destroy some of that thrilling newness, and therefore lose some potential pleasure. True, we enjoy discovering how the new item fits a known pattern, and neurocognitively, we survive because of our brain’s ability to identify pattern, so pattern is necessary, not an evil in 3 For the tension between these two imperatives, seeking wonder and offering help, see Kathryn Hume. 4 Joseph Dewey (4) argues that such cerebral quest for knowledge and novelty can lead to indifference, insulation, or narcissism, and that Love is necessary. 4 Hume: Novelty, Pattern, and Force in Richard Powers’s Orfeo itself; Powers does not create a false binary opposition. However, relying too heavily on pattern can deaden our responses to things observed, particularly in art.5 Beyond novelty and pattern lies power or force or control, the dangerous clus- ter of closely related terms in this novel’s politics. We see power or force exercised when something new and unusual is forced to fit an inappropriate pattern, as when Peter Els is forced to fit the popular idea of a bioterrorist. In The Gold Bug Variations, scientist Stuart Ressler essentially discovers DNA but backs off and gives up science. He argues against the genetic engineering that he foresees, saying, “It’s not science. Science is not about control. It is about cultivating a perpetual condition of wonder in the face of something that forever grows one step richer and subtler than our lat- est theory about it. It is about reverence, not mastery” (411). “The point of science was to lose ourselves in the world’s desire” (413). In Orfeo, Powers shows us this interplay of force and wonder in art, and gives us a new version of his angry politics, but he encases it in an Orphic pattern. When we recognize this compositional tactic of meshing the unpalatable with the well-known and cherished, we will see more clearly the failings of his protagonist, Peter Els, who tries to force his audiences to accept new music, something that seems to them unpatterned and therefore indi- gestible. We will also see the failings of surveillance society when dealing with an unusual but harmless citizen who does not fit known patterns. Els is a composer of avant-garde music. Indeed, he has succeeded in focusing so intently that he has achieved transcendent moments of wonder and ecstasy in three forms: in his family life, in music, and in science. Since his marriage ends in divorce, let me deal with that brief interlude. Els’s source of wonder is his baby daughter. He and she compose on her toy piano and xylophone, and he marvels when she uses the colors on her xylophone keys and spaces between alphabet blocks to create a system of notation, a readable pattern (186). Wonder enfolds him that she does this only a few dozen months away from herself being a single cell. Without prompting, she invents the very idea of notation. He lost that relationship with his daughter and the wonder it generated when his wife divorced him.
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